"Dirty Old Boston"

1985

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Probably around 1971: 100 Federal Street looks complete or completing. Noticed the cars already parked on the GC garage top ramp.
 
Prior to Flynn’s folly (aka the office on top of the GC garage) what did the top of the garage look like? Was it the bare concrete beams seen in that photo?
 
DZH22 said:
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Looks worse than the bombed-out Dresden Germany after WW II. I've often wondered over the years if this scorched-earth wholesale demolition of the Scollay/Haymarket Square and West End districts of Boston in the name of urban renewal wasn't actually inspired, on a subconscious level, by the cities in Europe that were partly wiped out in WW II. You know, let's wipe the slate clean, like the European cities were forced to do, and make a headlong leap into a bright dazzling future. Also, the personal trauma of WW II, which many of the US and local leaders had lived through, probably prompted them to want to erase a painful past and move on to Tomorrowland. Unfortunately, that all translated into destroying the history of large sectors of the city core and replacing them with a car-centric landscape of expressways, wide sweeping highway-like surface streets, empty plazas, and anonymous super blocks. At least burying the Central Artery with the Big Dig went a long way to at least creating a foundation to re-knit the city.
 
Charlie_mta said:
Looks worse than the bombed-out Dresden Germany after WW II. I've often wondered over the years if this scorched-earth wholesale demolition of the Scollay/Haymarket Square and West End districts of Boston in the name of urban renewal wasn't actually inspired, on a subconscious level, by the cities in Europe that were partly wiped out in WW II. You know, let's wipe the slate clean, like the European cities were forced to do, and make a headlong leap into a bright dazzling future. Also, the personal trauma of WW II, which many of the US and local leaders had lived through, probably prompted them to want to erase a painful past and move on to Tomorrowland. Unfortunately, that all translated into destroying the history of large sectors of the city core and replacing them with a car-centric landscape of expressways, wide sweeping highway-like surface streets, empty plazas, and anonymous super blocks. At least burying the Central Artery with the Big Dig went a long way to at least creating a foundation to re-knit the city.
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Yes, and many of the properties came relatively cheap, which means they were largely used by people not highly valued in the scheme of things. OTOH, real estate values in neighborhoods that we'd assume were prestigrious were not all that high during the Depression: my aunt worked as a WAVE nurse head and lively inexpensively in a multi-room flat in a former single family townhouse on a lot on Commonwealth & Clarendon that is now a tot lot.
 
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